The covenant - James A. Michener [421]
When Rhodes died, Frank was in Cape Town giving a deposition in the trial, and when he heard of the death he felt an overwhelming sense of failure: he had tried to protect this great man from his blunders and from this fiasco with the princess, but he had accomplished little. He was told that Rhodes had died just at sunset on 26 March 1902, forty-nine years old, consumed by the volcanic fires that had driven him. As he died he uttered his own sardonic epitaph: 'So little done, so much to do.'
When the Princess Catherine Rzewuska Radziwill heard of Rhodes' death she was only forty-four, disgraced, penniless, and facing a two-year sentence in one of Cape Town's worst prisons. She said of Rhodes: 'I wanted only to help this lonely, miserable man. Had he attended to me, he might have been saved.'
In prison, her first demand was for a book of rules, which she mastered with such diligence that she became a notorious 'jailhouse lawyer,' arguing for the rights of all prisoners. Long before her sentence was completed, the warden petitioned the court that she be set free: 'Whenever I see her coming at me with that book of rules, I am threatened with twitches.'
The conniving princess would not accept freedom unless the government provided her with first-class steamship passage to London, and enough cash to allow her to live in a respectable London hotel for half a year. Since the senior authorities were also developing twitches, they bowed to her demands, then requisitioned a tug to ensure that she got aboard. To the Afrikaner lawyer who had enthusiastically defended her against the Colossus, they said, 'Do not give her a penny of the money. Hand it in a sealed envelope to the captain of the ship, to be delivered only when the vessel is far out to sea.'
She wrote more books, thirty in all; she lectured; when Prince Radziwill, her husband, finally died, she quickly married a Swedish gentleman whom no one ever saw; she was condemned by Russia to perpetual exile; and by some bizarre set of accidents she landed in New York, which she loved. As Princess Radziwill, she became the darling of royalty-hungry Americans and lived off them in various ingenious ways. Never once during her long stay in that country did anyone uncover the fact that she had spent nearly two years in a South African prison as an embezzler.
Finally she wrote her autobiography, not one chapter of which was true; she enchanted new generations of New York society; and in 1941, at the age of eighty-three, she sat propped up in bed writing long letters to the rulers of Europe advising them how best to prosecute World War II. She signed her pronouncements: Princess Catherine Radziwilland when she died she was surrounded by three American ladies-in-waiting.
From the throats of a hundred Boers, young and old, fair-faced and weather-beaten, came a merry song that carried far beyond the great barn at Vrymeer in which they were celebrating. The melody was that of an American Civil War song, 'Just Before the Battle, Mother,' but the Afrikaner version, popular in the eighties, had to do with love, not war:
'When will our marriage be, Gertjie?
Why are you so very quiet?
We've been betrothed so long, Gertjie!
Now's the time for us to wed.
Come then, Gertjie, for I shall not
Be kept any longer on a string.
Perhaps you think I cannot die,
But my years are passing on!'
The grizzled warrior Paulus de Groot could not remember when last he had seen so many happy couples. 'Tonight, Jakob,' he shouted to the owner of the barn, 'there's many a heart will be lost under the stars of Vrymeer.' Van Doorn grinned back through a haze of smoke and dust.
General de Groot, as all thought of him, was guest of honor at the party, and with good reason, for in this very week back in February 1881 he had stormed Majuba Hill to thrash the English. And now, from fifty